New race engineers for McLaren

McLaren has reshuffled its race engineer crew, to get the best out of Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton next year.

Hamilton’s former race engineer, Phil Prew, has been promoted to principal race engineer, and engineer crews will be built around each of the drivers.

Lewis’ new race engineer will be Andy Latham, while Jenson will get Jakob Andreason. Managing director Jonathan Neale explained the positions:

“He’ll travel to every race and will manage the set-up, development, and sharing of data and information between both race engineering teams.”

“The race engineering team on Lewis’s car will be headed by Andy Latham, with Mark Temple as his performance engineer. On Jenson’s side, Jakob Andreason – a very experienced engineer who has worked alongside Phil on Lewis’s car for the last few years – will be the race engineer. Dave Robson, who’s also very experienced, will be Jenson’s performance engineer. We’re giving both drivers a fresh engineering team, with Phil as the bridge between them both.”

“It’s primarily to ensure there’s total transfer in the learning of set-up development. It gives us a figurehead and a go-to person for the rest of the organisation across the race weekend, so they can ask Phil: ‘What’s happening with set-up? Which way are we going?”

“We can also better use the simulation team and the engineers back at the McLaren Technology Centre to say to Phil: ‘You might want to try this,’ and Phil can supervise that flow of information.”

Andy Latham has been with McLaren since 2000. He was assistant race engineer to Fernando Alonso and Kimi Raikkonen, and then became test engineer for 2 seasons, before becoming Lewis’ new race engineer. Jakob Andreason has been with McLaren for 9 years, and has been an assistant race engineer since 2005.